DANCE REVIEW; City Center Kicks Off Free-Form Festival

By JENNIFER DUNNING

Published: September 30, 2004

City Center built it and they came, on Tuesday night, for the opening of the theater's first Fall for Dance Festival. There was even a downpour, courtesy of Hurricane Jeanne, that was worthy of the storms that added extra excitement to the outdoor Delacorte Dance Festival in the 1960's and 70's.

That was the free-wheeling and free model for Fall for Dance, which is almost free at $10 for all seats. The idea was in large part to build a new audience for dance. All performances were sold out for the full 2,700-seat theater, though a City Center spokeswoman said that some returns are available each night.

Like the Delacorte, the mix was wildly eclectic. There was pure dance here, provided by Dance Theater of Harlem and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, bravura solo performing by David Neumann, and piquant crowd-pleasers by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Streb, a troupe of high-flying acrobat dancers. The Fall for Dance curators, Elise Bernhardt and Ellen Dennis, seemed to be aiming for a festive opening-night mix that would start things off with a bang.

This first of six programs also had a bit of historical resonance. ''Agon,'' which began the evening, was one of the most important works in a series of collaborations between George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky that would change the look of 20th-century ballet and how audiences looked at it. And ''Agon'' received its premiere at City Center in 1957, performed by the New York City Ballet, then a resident company at the theater. One of four lead dancers was a vibrant youngster named Arthur Mitchell, who founded Dance Theater of Harlem and joined the dancers onstage for a bow on Tuesday that was bittersweet, since this is the last planned performance by the troupe, which is on a six- to nine-month hiatus for reorganization.

The dancers did him proud, although it is likely that Mr. Mitchell danced the central pas de deux in ''Agon'' more resiliently than Kip Sturm, a fine, veteran performer who looked a little stiff in the duet on Tuesday. Tai Jimenez, his partner, danced with a clarity that underscored the choreography's formal patterns and shifting body lines, but she also caught something of the vengeful spirit of the music in one brief passage.

The entire cast brought an extra emotional edge to the ballet, with Duncan Cooper standing out for the way he allowed himself to sink into the fleeting moments of luscious physical abandon inherent in the music and choreography. Akua Parker, Dionne Figgins and Ebony Haswell caught the feisty and impudent overtones of the ballet and its jazz-influenced score, in a lead cast completed by Preston Dugger and Fidel Garcia.

Current and former dancers with the Jones-Zane company poured out onto the stage in various stages of undress in a reworking by Mr. Jones of ''Continuous Replay,'' by Mr. Zane, his partner, who died in 1988. The two also appeared at City Center in a basement theater early in their career. Mr. Jones turned the work into a pell-mell pageant for this performance, sending 37 dancers of all sizes and shapes streaking, loping and crawling across the stage.

The fascination of the piece lay in its juxtaposition of clusters and lines of individual dancers and in the varying speeds at which they moved. Best of all, ''Continuous Replay'' looked like a Muybridge reworking of an Eakins painting, with Robert Wierzel's lighting subtly playing up the exquisite array of skin tones.

Elizabeth Streb's ''Ricochet'' looked deceptively simple, as if Ms. Streb had told her six dancers just to go out and have a good time jumping and flying off a huge trampoline and landing with satisfyingly frightening thuds on a pad below. But a closer look revealed that there was considerable formal plotting to these soaring bounces and belly flops in a witty piece made more complex by filmed images of the dancers in action. ''Wild Blue Yonder,'' which unfolded behind a huge plexiglass panel, ended up looking like a science-project ant farm crawling with hyperactive dancers instead of insects.

Mr. Neumann embodied a streetwise hustler in ''Dose,'' a solo performed in front of the curtain to a song by Tom Waits that also evoked the urban drug hustle. Fluid and craggy, Mr. Neumann recalled the great solo performer Daniel Nagrin and the vivid antiheroes he portrayed in the 1960's.

The Cunningham company, which once performed annually at City Center, provided just the right close in Mr. Cunningham's 1965 ''How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run,'' set to a soundscore by John Cage that featured amusing anecdotes, read on stage by Mr. Cunningham and David Vaughan, the company's archivist. In truth, the humor felt slightly dated in this setting. But the dancing was timeless in its luminous, quietly eloquent appropriation of space.